Exploratory Seminars

What to Keep and How to Analyze It: Data Curation and Data Analysis with Multiple Phases

May 2013

Rapid advances in technology have allowed us to collect vast amounts of data in myriad fields and forms, but our ability to manage and analyze these data has not kept pace. As a result, the amount of data collected far exceeds what can be analyzed and, often, what can be archived. These issues only become more pressing as data collection accelerates. Astronomers and astrophysicists, for example, collect terabytes of data per night; the phrase “drowning in a data tsunami” is increasingly used to describe this situation. The issues of what to keep and what to distribute are surprisingly complex, even when we put aside technological issues such as long-term storage and retrieval. A central challenge is the fundamental conflict between reducing the size of data and preserving information for future scientific inquires and statistical analyses. Complicating matters further, the parties/teams involved in the entire data collection, curation, and analysis process often have only limited communication with each other owing to the sequential nature of this process. This seminar brings together a core group of leading experts and emerging scholars in information and natural sciences to discuss, debate, and design principles and strategies to address this grand challenge, which increasingly affects almost every aspect of science and society.